Packet transmission equipment and packet transmission system

Abstract

Traffic flowing through packet transmission equipment comes in countless variations ranging from traffic from harmless general users, to PC virus-infected users, and users with harmful intent. Transferring all of this traffic together through a module for monitoring causes a great loss in throughput and is an extremely inefficient way to handle general user traffic. After checking the module processing results, the system administrator can resolve this situation by changing each user's transfer module but making this setting manually is unwieldy and lacks flexibility. A security level can be set on table in the platform module linking each user to the destination application module. By dynamically changing this security level according to processing results in each module, each user's destination application module can be changed smoothly and flexibly.

1 . Packet transmission equipment including a platform module, and multiple application modules and a packet receiver and a packet transmitter, 
 the platform module comprising:    a packet transfer processor for transferring packets input from the packet receiver to the application module or the packet transmitter, and    a user identification module for identifying the sender (user) of the received packet, and    a memory for storing according to the user, one or multiple application modules as the destination for the packet sent from the user, as well as security levels for the corresponding users, wherein    the application module includes:    a packet transfer processor for transferring packets to the platform module, other application modules, or a packet transmitter, and    a security level identification module for identifying the security level of the packet that was transferred, and    a packet processor for processing the packet that was transferred.    
   
   
       2 . Packet transmission equipment according to  claim 1 , wherein 
 the platform module copies a portion of the multiple packets that were input, and transfers the copied packets to any of the multiple application modules.    
   
   
       3 . Packet transmission system including multiple application equipment, and packet transmission equipment including a platform module and a packet receiver and a packet transmitter, connected to the multiple application equipment, 
 the platform module for the packet transmission equipment comprising:    a packet transfer processor for transferring packets input from the packet receiver to the application equipment or the packet transmitter, and    a user identification module for identifying the sender of the received packet, and    a memory for storing according to the user, one or multiple application equipment as the destination for the packet sent from the user, as well as security levels for the corresponding users, wherein    the application equipment includes:    a packet transfer processor for transferring packets to the platform module, other application equipment, or a packet transmitter, and    a security level identification module for identifying the security level of the packet that was transferred, and    a packet processor for processing the packet that was transferred.    
   
   
       4 . Packet transmission system according to  claim 3 , wherein 
 the platform module also copies a portion of the multiple packets that were input, and transfers the copied packets to any of the multiple application equipment.    
   
   
       5 . Packet transmission equipment according to  claim 1 , wherein 
 a search is made of the information in the memory of the platform module, to determine the application module serving as the packet destination for each user sending a packet.    
   
   
       6 . Packet transmission equipment according to  claim 1 , wherein 
 instead of storing according to the user, one or multiple application modules destinations for the packet sent from the user, as well as security levels for the corresponding users,    the memory in the platform module stores according to the input port, one or multiple application module destinations for packets input from the port, and the security levels for that port, and a search is made of information within the memory to determine the application module serving as the packet destination for each port.    
   
   
       7 . Packet transmission system according to  claim 3 , wherein 
 a search is made of information within the memory inside the platform module to determine the application equipment serving as the packet destination for each packet sender.    
   
   
       8 . Packet transmission system according to  claim 3 , wherein 
 instead of storing according to the user, one or multiple application equipment destinations for packets sent from the users, as well as security levels for the corresponding users,    the memory in the platform module stores according to the input port, one or multiple application destinations for packets input from the port, and the security levels for that port, and a search is made of information within the memory to determine the application equipment serving as the packet destination for each port.    
   
   
       9 . Packet transmission equipment according to  claim 1 , for sending a control message to the platform module from the application module, to change the information within the memory in the platform module based on that control message.  
   
   
       10 . Packet transmission system according to  claim 3 , for sending a control message from the application/network equipment to the platform module, to change the information within the memory of the platform module based on that control message.  
   
   
       11 . Packet transmission equipment according to  claim 2 , wherein a control message is sent from the application module to the platform module, to request increasing or decreasing the modules based on that control message, or to change the extent of packet copying by the sampling module.